There are many--and I would count myself among them--who felt that the officials played too large a part in determining the outcome of Monday night's Ravens-Patriots game. Specifically, I am talking about the 4th and 5 defensive holding call. Now, this call is certainly more controversial than, say, the "holding" calls against Pitt from Saturday, not only because the call against the Ravens actually turned a victory into defeat, but also because it is far less clear that the defensive holding call actually was bad.
Peter King, for instance, defended the call, saying:

"Once Watson gets past the 8-yard line, it's illegal for Winborne to have anything but
incidental contact with Watson, but he clearly has an arm on him well past the 8, and all the way into the end zone. Maybe the call should have been holding, maybe the call should have been illegal contact, but it was a legitimate call, not a ticky-tack one."

There are two ways, I think, to interpret what King is saying here when he calls the flag "legitimate" and not "ticky-tack". The first would be that, as per the events he describes, Winborne's actions fit the description of defensive holding, and therefore the call was legitimate (in this scenario, a "ticky-tack" call would involve something, perhaps, that looked like a penalty but strictly speaking was not). The second interpretation is that, with regards to the context in which the penalty was called, the penalty was legitimate.
Before I rebut King's point, let me briefly state my own position, which will in turn clarify my problem with his argument. I subscribe to the 'prevailing' notion that the players, not the officials, should decide ballgames. Absent any concrete circumstances, this can sound vague and rhetorical; but in practice I think it generally means that officiating needs to be contextual. That is, the range of what fouls/penalties/etc. get called might need to change given the context of the game. And I know I am not alone in holding that when a game gets down to the final minute(s), or the last few plays/possessions in a big game, that officials ought to "let the players play", so to speak, and save penalty flags and whistles for only the truly egregious fouls.
So it is important to understand that I (and others who feel similarly) are not necessarily criticizing the defensive holding flag insofar as it was actually a penalty--the criticism isn't that no defensive holding took place (this might be our criticism of the holding calls in the WVU-Pitt game), but that the holding was not egregious enough to be called at such an important juncture of the game. Which is why it matters, to some extent, which interpretation we attribute to King. For on the first interpretation, his point misses the mark, since most are not denying that, technically, defensive holding took place; the call was bad because "ticky-tack" defensive holding shouldn't have been called on a play of this magnitude. If we (perhaps more charitably) attribute the latter meaning to his argument, he is certainly addressing the meat of our argument, but I am not sure that anything he says ultimately supports his point. For the situation he describes (Winborne riding Watson past the 5-yard mark where contact is allowed) doesn't seem to merit a flag within this context. It's fine if King doesn't think that the call was "ticky-tack" like many do--but everything he says merely shows that the flag was correct only in the most technical sense. Which is exactly what people mean when they call a penalty "ticky-tack".

Cardinal's-Eye View

There were some crazy football games this weekend, but it seemed to take place admist some very poor officiating. Pitt beat West Virginia despite what could only be described as the officials' best efforts to give WVU the game (two ridiculously bad holding calls on two of the game's biggest plays, and the second one followed by a pretty questionable no-call on defensive holding against WVU). But, yeah, that outcome was... unexpected.
In any case, I was very happy to see my Rams improve to 3-9 (though maybe I shouldn't be, since at this point we're only costing ourselves draft position...) and Ohio State luck into the championship game. The only thing that ruined it was the Browns losing. Now, granted, they didn't play very well, turned it over four times, so I guess in some sense they 'deserved' to lose--but this game is the type of game that good playoff teams find a way to win, and in a very real sense we should have won that game. And we would have won that game, if not for an extremely bad call at the end of the game. I mean, if I were to give someone a textbook example of what a "force-out" was, this would be the play I would show. If that catch by Kellen Winslow isn't a force-out, then what is? And what was that official even looking at? It looked like he wasn't even watching, like he was expecting the ball to be incomplete-- or perhaps he was in a hurry to get the game over with so he could go collect his giant bag of money from the Cardinals.